Das Rheingold - Wagner - Two Sopranos & Cousin John
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
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| Jennifer Ashley - Soprano |
Saturday night I attended ViVace Opera’s
concert production of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold held at St. Mark’s Anglican
Church.
I have always defined a true friend as
someone who will help you on moving day. There is a new addition to this maxim
of mine, “A friend is someone who will find no excuse not to accompany you for
any production of Wagner.”
At the end of last night’s performance of
the two-hour-twenty-four-minute opera, soprano Alexandra Hill thanked me
for coming but said, “You came alone.”
I could not tell her that she was wrong and
that I had come with Cousin John’s ghost.
Cousin John Hayward’s father Freddy was my
father’s younger brother. He and Iris had two children, Dianne and John. When I
was serving as a conscript in the Argentine Navy when I was 21 I would often
visit them at tea time as Aunt Iris (pronounced eery-s) made the best deviled
ham in the world. Cousin John, tall, thin, and blonde in his Argentine Army
uniform (he was also doing his military service) resembled one of Hitler’s best
Wehrmacht soldiers. His superiority was obvious as he would look down on me (down that long Hayward nose) as
an uncouth Argentine who had lived in Mexico too long. Cousin John was
cultured and loved not only symphonic music (at the time I loathed it) but was
a fan of opera. He was particularly crazy about Wagner. Cousin John and I had
nothing in common so we didn’t talk much.
Shortly after one of those afternoon teas I
fell in love with an Argentine girl of Jewish/Austrian extraction. Susana loved
me in spite of the fact that I surely was uncouth as I loved jazz and she loved
opera. She commanded me to put on my best (and only) suit as she was going to
take me to the opera. My first opera at the venerable Teatro Colón was Sergei Prokofiev’s Fiery Angel. From my point
of view it wasn’t bad. I preferred our second outing when we saw Christoff Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo
ed Euridice.
Seeing Plácido Domingo
(a young tenor at the time) in Mexico
City’s Bellas Artes in Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore was
exciting for me. This was around 1974, By the time I came to Vancouver I had come to accept symphonic
music even though I preferred baroque and the smaller string quartets. Having
to photograph opera stars for the Georgia Straight gave me the opportunity to
go to many opera performances and I became a fan. In all that I managed to see
one Wagner opera, The Flying Dutchman.
Cousin John rose
quickly in Buenos Aires in the hierarchy of the
Royal Bank of Canada and was
soon sent with a very good executive position to Toronto. We met several times and for once I
had a few things we could talk about. The last time I saw him during a business
trip to Toronto
he invited me to his beautifully appointed apartment and we watched (believe it
or not!) Wagner excerpts on a very large TV. I had a good time.
A few weeks later I
received a beautiful letter from Cousin John telling me that we were finally
more than just first cousins but friends, too.
A year later he died. I felt sad but good that we had
resolved our distances in the end.
Last night was my
first full-fledged Wagner opera in spite of the fact that it was not at the
Colón. It was in a church and the instrumental music backing the singers was a
single piano, most ably and beautifully played by Luke Housner.
Housner is a gentle,
soft-spoken man whose Vivace Opera project (five years in the running) has a
mission. It gives the opportunity for budding singers to be exposed to the
rigors of thorough musical awareness to the degree that they could apply this
technique to approaching other roles. They will be further equipped to tackle auditions
and competitions, enhancing their hire-ability.
I was talking to the
excellent soprano Jennifer Ashley who played Fricka during a rare and usually verboten
break in the opera. Housner wanted to be kind to our bums and bladders.
Ashley told me that
somehow she had not been involved in last year’s Vivace but as soon as she
found out that Wagner was in the works she had to be part of it. “How often do
we have the chance to sing Wagner in Vancouver,”
she told me with excitement.
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| Alexandra Hill - Soprano |
As for my friend
Alexandra Hill, that beautiful and elegant soprano, I could not avert my eyes
from her role as the Rheinmaiden Wellgunde. She an the other two, played by
Szu-Wen Wang and Leah Field with big taunting smiles as they dealt with
Alberich, the Niebelung dwarf proved to me that I indeed can laugh at a Wagner
opera as it isn’t all as serious as we have been known to think. When the
fabulous (no other word suffices) Wotan played by Jeremy Ireland (a
bass/baritone) and Loge the god of fire (played by Kevin Armstrong most ably) craftily
convince Albrecht (in possession of not only the ring but also the magical
helmet, the Tarnhelm) to turn himself into a toad/frog, and they catch him I
had to laugh again!
An intimate
introduction (I was seated on the first row) to a Wagner opera with a sole
piano and a couple of singers I knew was exactly what I have needed all these
years to launch me into the possibility of getting a good cushion and going to
the nearest performance of the Ring Cycle in a near future.
I know that Cousin
John with a smug smile would simply have said to me, “Finally.”
